Borders and prisons: ready for demolition

Today, January 8, 2019, exactly six years after the trial against me for incitement on January 8, 2013, the Supreme Court has decided: for writing two articles and for an action in the council chamber of the municipality of Zeist against the family prison at Kamp Zeist I will be send to prison for a total of two and a half months. Do I find that shocking? No. This started seven years ago with a raid, house search, three days in complete restrictions in a police cell at the National Criminal Investigation Department and the taking offline of my website: on charges of ‘sedition’. The texts in question are still on my website. Two of them are forbidden: ‘Rara, whose legal order is it?’ And ‘Where is the Dutch rebellion?’ The prosecution apparently does not bother to do something about it, evidently because they also know that this is useless, but still they find it necessary to lock me up because of it many years later. In the meantime, the threat, control and repression have been unremitting ever since. By cowardly imposing a conditional punishment for that “sedition”, it was hoped that I would withhold myself. But probation is just like the law: irrelevant if children are locked up and deported. Does the Dutch state really think that by locking me up I would change my mind? Hilarious! Because while they hope to get rid of me, the deportation machine will continue, people will drown in the Mediterranean, more walls and fences will be built, and people who oppose this policy will also be targets of repression, migrants and refugees first. So no, they will not be rid of me. I write, no matter where, to denounce them and to point out their responsibility for the deaths of many, in the hope to awake others. In the hope that more people will come into action, in whatever way. If according to their laws my words are labeled as “sedition”, the state obviously feels threatened by it. All right then. Every word a spark! I am not finished yet. The state with its borders is worth nothing but its overthrow. It is time to mobilize resistance. And fast as well. For the freedom to live, not just to survive.

My persecution and sentencing – and that of countless people fighting the borders in solidarity with refugees, such as the Briançon 7 in France, or that prevent deportations, such as the Stansted 15 in England, that actually tear down fences and walls, combating the increasing fascism with more than just words – is an expected reaction from authorities who see their mask of Western standards and values ​​mercilessly jerked off. It is a reaction that means that we are on the right track. If our voices and actions were not hindering them, they would let us continue. Repression is the state’s response to our strength and our strength will resist that repression. No prison will help them. Because we will not forget for a moment that the bottom of the Mediterranean is full of the bodies of people who resisted the militarized Fortress Europe. It’s the only thing they can do. Is it not over sea, then in the back of trucks where people risk death by suffocation. But it is also more visible when people climb over the fences of Melilla and Ceuta and, in doing so, get more than just their clothes ripped. Resistance to migration control will always continue,

because of all those people who are in camps in Libya and are being tortured, raped, and traded as slaves;
because of all those people who do not even get through the Sahara;
because of all those people who are shot at the Turkish-Syrian border or who are otherwise stopped with a wall paid by the EU;
because of all those people in the bitter-cold and crowded Greek camps;
because of all those people in Calais and Ostend who are being hunted and deprived of their scarce means of livelihood;
because of the many drownings in the Mediterranean Sea, and the stopping of rescue ships;
because of the lifelong waiting for the right to exist;
because of everything we never get to hear, all the crimes of the writing desk killers in offices and government buildings.

So,

because of all the repression against refugees that we can not even see, that on our behalf, EU citizens with a passport, are being outsourced to dictatorial regimes outside of Europe, accomplices of the extreme right-wing politics here pretending refugees are entitled to something – what a lie;
because of all the repression against refugees in the streets of Europe, which is kept hidden from us but which we can see if we want to;

I tell the Dutch state: it does not matter what you do. All of this calls for action, revolution, insurrection. And if a price has to be payed for it, then it shows you for what you really are: powerful, but frightened criminals in offices with security that get away with everything. We will always continue to fight you. Bring it on. That two-and-a-half month imprisonment of yours is in the light of your hidden mass murder, your secret racist, nationalist and colonial war against refugees, most of all just another crime. It is kidnapping, hostage taking. But I will use the time you want to take from me against you. Time to think about follow-up steps, new plans. In the attack. In word and deed. Those prisons of you are just like your borders and laws: ready for demolition.